Blog

Jeremy Chan-Kraushar believes in creating a learning culture that helps students develop positive identities as learners and the power of competency-based learning to do just that. Former teacher and co-founder of New York City Department of Education’s Mastery Collaborative, a network of 42 schools implementing competency-based learning across New York City, Chan-Kraushar spoke about learner identity at SXSWedu last month, and the ways in which competency-based learning can be culturally responsive and build equity in education.

Social understandings and behaviours are closely interwoven with emotions, temperament, values, attitudes,knowledge and skills.

Children are born social. Social capacity develops as children interact with supportive, stimulating, safe people and places. Tuning in, listening and watching closely can help adults to understand what might be giving rise to a child's behaviour. It can help to think of behaviour as the tip of an iceberg—there’s usually an emotional base hidden underneath.

As teachers, there are so many ways to interact with children while they play. One way to join in play is to narrate what you see happening. When you narrate children’s actions, you both describe what you see but also make inferences about what is taking place. These inferences can launch the conversation between you and the children. Children can add on to what you said or even correct your ideas. This gives you the opportunity to rephrase their words and incorporate rich vocabulary and detailed descriptions.

Helping Australians living with Alzheimer's and Dementia manage better at home.

Our day clock aims to assist people with memory loss and ease the workload of their families and carers. With a simple and clear display, our clock assists sufferers to link time with their daily routine, and considerably improve daily life.

In a small but never the less crucial Facebook posting yesterday, Deputy Premier, Minister for Education and Emergency Services and State Member for Monbulk, James Merlino made a crucial announcement saying, quote: “We don’t want any child to fall behind. That is why we will invest $65.5 million to make sure every prep has a health check, employ more speech pathologists and provide even more mental health support”

There’s been much discussion recently regarding the “language gap” and the “word gap” — the recognition that there are huge variations in levels of children’s language ability by the time they start school. Some of our research has investigated how children’s spoken language sets the foundation for literacy development. It is clear that children with low levels of spoken language are at risk for reading failure, particularly with it comes to reading comprehension.